(from Green Branches & Fallen Leaves)
Not all of the early settlers came to Shawnigan district either by railroad or because of the mill. In 1886 the Raymond family with the parents, two boys and four girls, landed at Cowichan Bay, and walked to their homestead — about a six-mile trek south along the Goldstream Trail. They settled just below the south slope of Cobble Hill on the property that is now the Bamberton Quarry (Kingzett Lake).
The Raymonds left the property in the 1890’s but their former employee, a well-liked Chinese man named Sam, carried on the place and raised the Sam family who attended the Shawnigan Lake school for years, and later became respected members of the Victoria Chinese Community.
When Mr. Griffith Hughes built up the Frondeg Farm (once Heatherbank Farm and now Hidden Meadows Farm), the Sams burnt lime for him (taken from the mountain) for farm applications. In 1948, Mr. N. W. Joyce bought the property from Mrs. Walter Luney (who was a Raymond), and he in turn sold the place in 1953 to the B.C. Cement Co. Ltd., who found there limestone of sufficient quantity and quality to warrant the building of a private paved road to their plant on the Malahat.
The Raymond name has been kept alive locally\ by its application to the E. & N. Railway crossing just north of “Beeson’s Bridge.” Also arriving by Goldstream Trail from Cowichan Bay in 1876, before the railroad, was the well-known Copley family.
They settled first in a log cabin on what is now Filgate Road, overlooking what was known as Hubbard’s Meadow and now overgrown. The Copley family then built a big home on the Shawnigan-Cobble Hill Road (or Goldstream Trail) at a point on the west side of the road just south of Filgate Road. The two houses situated at this point now (1966) were built from the material of the big house when it
was torn down.
Some members of the original Copley family were buried in a little graveyard down Filgate Road. All signs of this early cemetery have by now become obliterated.
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